(Press-News.org) Archaeologists working in Guatemala have unearthed new information about the Maya civilization's transition from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary way of life.
Led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, the team's excavations of the ancient Maya lowlands site of Ceibal suggest that as the society transitioned from a heavy reliance on foraging to farming, mobile communities and settled groups co-existed and may have come together to collaborate on construction projects and participate in public ceremonies.
The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge two common assumptions: that mobile and sedentary groups maintained separate communities, and that public buildings were constructed only after a society had fully put down roots.
"There has been the theory that sedentary and mobile groups co-existed in various parts of the world, but most people thought the sedentary and mobile communities were separate, even though they were in relatively close areas," said Inomata, a UA professor of anthropology and lead author of the PNAS study. "Our study presents the first relatively concrete evidence that mobile and sedentary people came together to build a ceremonial center."
A public plaza uncovered at Ceibal dates to about 950 B.C., with surrounding ceremonial buildings growing to monumental sizes by about 800 B.C. Yet, evidence of permanent residential dwellings in the area during that time is scarce. Most people were still living a traditional hunter-gatherer-like lifestyle, moving from place to place throughout the rainforest, as they would continue to do for five or six more centuries.
The area's few permanent residents could not have built the plaza alone, Inomata said.
"The construction of ceremonial buildings is pretty substantial, so there had to be more people working on that construction," he said.
Inomata and his colleagues theorize that groups with varying degrees of mobility came together to construct the buildings and to participate in public ceremonies over the next several hundred years. That process likely helped them to bond socially and eventually make the transition to a fully sedentary society.
"This tells us something about the importance of ritual and construction. People tend to think that you have a developed society and then building comes. I think in many cases it's the other way around," Inomata said.
"For those people living the traditional way of life, ceremony, ritual and construction became major forces for them to adapt a new way of life and build a new society. The process of gathering for ritual and gathering for construction helped bring together different people who were doing different things, and eventually that contributed to the later development of Mayan civilization."
The transition was gradual, with the Maya making the shift to a fully sedentary agrarian society, reliant on maize, by about 400 or 300 B.C., Inomata said.
"The most fascinating finding is that different peoples with diverse ways of life co-existed in apparent harmony for generations before establishing a more uniform society," said Melissa Burham, a study co-author and a graduate student in the UA School of Anthropology. "Discovering an ancient 'melting pot' is definitely the unexpected highlight of this research."
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Other UA co-authors on the paper include Jessica MacLellan, an anthropology graduate student, and Jessica Munson, a recent UA graduate.
Inomata and his colleagues from the UA have been working for 10 years at Ceibal, along with collaborators from the United States, Canada, Guatemala and Japan. Their work is funded by the Alphawood Foundation; the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan KAKENHI; and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI.
Inomata is one of four chairs of the UA's Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice, which supports scientific and cultural studies rooted in the environment and social justice.
CLEMSON, S.C. -- Researchers have long believed that supercomputers give universities a competitive edge in scientific research, but now they have some hard data showing it's true.
A Clemson University team found that universities with locally available supercomputers were more efficient in producing research in critical fields than universities that lacked supercomputers.
A supercomputer that can do 551 trillion calculations per second is housed at Clemson's Information Technology Center.
A supercomputer that can do 551 trillion calculations per second is housed at ...
DALLAS, March 23, 2015 -- Kids exposed to their parents' smoking may have a higher risk of developing heart disease in adulthood than those whose parents didn't smoke, according to research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.
The study's results add to the growing evidence that exposure to smoking from parents has a lasting effect on children's cardiovascular health in adulthood.
Researchers tracked participants in the Cardiovascular Risk in Young Finns Study, which included childhood exposure to parental smoking in 1980 and 1983. They collected carotid ...
A blood test that measures the number of cells shed from prostate tumours into the bloodstream can act as an early warning sign that treatment is not working, a major new study shows.
Researchers showed that measuring the numbers of circulating tumour cells in the blood predicted which men were benefitting least from a prostate cancer drug after as little as 12 weeks of treatment.
They hope their work will allow doctors to switch patients to alternative treatments earlier than is currently possible, if these results are confirmed by further studies. The research could ...
Insulin resistance is a risk factor for developing both type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Almost one third of the U.S. population has some degree of insulin resistance, though it is undiagnosed in many of these individuals. Obesity is associated with reduced insulin sensitivity and the development of insulin resistance. However, recent large-scale genetic studies have indicated that insulin resistance is heritable. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation identifies a gene that is strongly associated with the presence of many features of insulin resistance. ...
Gliobststoma (GBM) is a highly aggressive brain tumor that is resistant to many conventional cancer therapies. The kinase mTOR induces pathways that are aberrantly activated in GBM. However, mTOR inhibitors have not shown much promise for treating GBM. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation indicates that mTOR inhibitor resistance in GBM is likely the result of compensatory glutamine metabolism. Kazuhiro Tanaka and colleagues at Kobe University determined that glutaminase and glutamine levels increase in GBM cells and xenografts in response to mTOR inhibition. ...
TORONTO, March 23, 2015 -- Across all income levels, Canadian moms in better socioeconomic standing have better health outcomes than moms in lower socioeconomic brackets. The same relationship between socioeconomic position and health outcomes holds true for these moms' newborn babies, according to a new study.
A team of researchers placed 68,705 Canadian new moms and their babies along a socioeconomic spectrum by using factors about the moms such as education, whether she was living in poverty and the income of the neighbourhood she lives in. The researchers compared ...
(PHILADELPHIA) - Open the medicine cabinet of a senior and you're likely to find scores of pill bottles. Physicians are often unaware of all the medications a patient is taking, which can result in unnecessary additional prescriptions, non-prescription medications and potential drug-drug interactions that cause unexpected adverse effects. When a cancer diagnosis is thrown into the mix, the drug-drug interactions can become even more complex. A new study evaluates the currently available screening tools for determining if and when seniors with cancer are taking too many ...
In the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis (CF), the most severe symptoms are recurring episodes of lung inflammation and bacterial infection (known as "exacerbations") that happen from one to three times a year and cause ever-increasing amounts of lung damage through the course of a CF patient's life. While it is well understood that CF lung problems are ultimately due to bacterial infections encouraged by a CF patient's abnormally thick mucus, medical science has been unable to define specific causes that trigger the periodic flare-ups.
In a recent article in the Journal ...
DURHAM, N.C. -- Population growth could cause global demand for water to outpace supply by mid-century if current levels of consumption continue. But it wouldn't be the first time this has happened, a Duke University study finds.
Using a delayed-feedback mathematical model that analyzes historic data to help project future trends, the researchers identified a regularly recurring pattern of global water use in recent centuries. Periods of increased demand for water -- often coinciding with population growth or other major demographic and social changes -- were followed ...
The World Health Organization and UNICEF have commissioned the first comprehensive, multi-country analysis on water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) services in health care facilities, calling for global action to push toward 100 percent coverage of these services through new policies, collaboration, monitoring and training.
The report, released March 17, evaluated available WaSH data from 66,101 health-care facilities in 54 low- and middle-income countries and found that 38 percent of those facilities lack an improved water source, 19 percent lack improved sanitation, ...
